Maya: Falsifying Power Sidechannels with Operating System Support
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The security of computers is at risk because of information leaking through the system's physical outputs like power, temperature and electromagnetic (EM) emissions. Through advanced methods of signal measurement and analysis, attackers have compromised the security of many systems, recovering sensitive and personal data. Countermeasures that have been proposed demand new hardware and unfortunately, cannot protect the billions of devices today. In this work, we propose Maya, an OS-level defense against power side channels that can be easily deployed on existing systems. Maya modifies a computer's power to portray false activity, and uses several new ideas. First, Maya uses robust control theory to make the outputs follow any target patterns closely. Second, it creatively generates these patterns to mislead signal analysis. Finally, Maya overcomes the lack of OS-configurable parameters to change power by introducing "elastic" applications. These applications serve as software actuators that are set by the robust controller to change a system's power. We implement Maya in two different platforms and show its effectiveness and ease of deployment. To the best of our knowledge, Maya is the first OS-level defense against physical side channels.
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